The City of Tampere’s open data to a new portal

Published
Dec. 3 2018 02:14 PM
By
Hanna Porrassalmi

The public data open for everyone is available at data.tampere.fi.

Juha Suhonen/ Visit Tampere

At the moment, the City of Tampere’s Open Data Service includes 114 datasets which deal with the constructed environment, health and social services, education, local government and traffic, for example. Data is provided both in the form of files and as APIs. For instance, the purchase invoices of the city and the aerial photographs of Tampere from 1946 onwards have been published in a file format. In addition, bus locations, bus timetables and information on events in Tampere are available as real-time APIs. The most recent addition is the Respa resource reservation API that enables users to utilise the status data of public spaces and other public resources in different services. The first pilot of the Respa service is done as part of the City of Tampere’s Varaamo reservation booking system.

Open data has been utilised, for instance, to build different mobile applications. Project Manager Joonas Dukpa believes that the most frequently used applications are the ones related to traffic.

– For instance, the winner of the Apps for Pirkanmaa competition, the Nysse application, has after its win expanded to eight other urban regions in Finland and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, says Dukpa.

Easier access to public data

Tampere has already made its data open to the public before; however, with the new portal, the city wants to improve the availability of the opened datasets and make them easier to find. The datasets have been broken down into categories and include keywords, the year the publications have been gathered in one place and the groups of data that have similar datasets have been grouped together as data collections. The search functionalities of the portal are more diverse than before, and the dataset contents contain descriptions not only in Finnish but also in English. The new portal enables you to create a preview and graphics of the datasets without downloading and analysing the dataset content. The portal also facilitates the utilisation of the opened data because it automatically generates APIs for the data, which means that the data can be utilised directly in visualising, for instance.

A new feature of the website is the application showcase. The application showcase includes mobile applications, exercise works and theses that have utilised local open data. Furthermore, instructions on opening and utilising data will be gathered in the portal.

In principle, all the data generated by the city is open unless there is a protection need due to data security, data protection or restrictions related to access rights. New datasets will be opened based on need and in relation with the system reforms. The dataset amount of the data.tampere.fi portal will be increased as new data resources are opened.

The portal has been developed as a part of the 6Aika project in cooperation with the six largest cities (Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Tampere, Turku and Oulu) in Finland. The data portal has been built using open source technology and, therefore, it can also be deployed in other municipalities. In the future, the data contained on the portal will be transmitted to the national avoindata.fi portal and the European Union Open Data Portal.